Jan Ringoš

Despite my natural pessimism I very much applaud that, and your intentions to continue. It's nice to see that dialog being properly themed. What I personally would love to see in this regard is combing through the whole GDI, making all rendering alpha-safe, so that all GDI surfaces (and thus Win32 controls) could be composited over DWM "mica" backdrops. All the "legacy" dialogs would get modern facelift almost for free. There'd be breaking changes, of course, so the transparency-supporting controls would need to be opt-in, say COMCTL v7. And it would break ClearType rendering, which would annoy me very much, but text rendering could be deferred to composition time, in DWM, and everything that's ugly grayscale anti-aliased now could be nice and crisp again. Ah, man can dream. I hope you achieve at least a fraction of that.

@JanRingos @AdamFilipMiko Tough work for sure, but our recent work in dark theme for the Run dialog had us touching COMCTL to support this as a property. Now we are working to figure out how to safely scale this approach.

There’s a lot of work underway that Pavan shared earlier today. Something that I know has been at the top of a lot of people’s minds is the feeling that feedback goes into a void, without real people to review and see it on the other side. To help with that, I’ll be taking on an expanded role as the exec sponsor of the Windows Insider Program to listen, engage, and help shape what’s ahead with the Windows community. Over the coming weeks, we’ll also introduce you to members of the product teams that will help you get answers on the topics you care about most. I’d love to hear from you. What would you like to see more of from us as we get started?

@zacbowden I like Scott, but I'll believe it when I see it.

THE Scott Hanselmen is working on the Windows K2 effort. Windows is truly saved 🙌

@GetFacted_ @shanselman Very good question!

@shanselman Does Microsoft have the institutional knowledge to optimize windows, and do it correctly, anymore?

Working on this is part of my new job! Even more to come blogs.windows.com/windows-inside…

@AdamFilipMiko @marcusash That would require a deep dive into Win32 layer to extend it of new capabilities and features. It won't happen. Touching these parts is politically forbidden since Windows 8. And it CAN'T happen because most programmers capable of doing it have long since left Microsoft.

@marcusash 2/2 Another thing I'd love to see is more modernized parts of basic UI. Dark mode updates for dialogs are welcome but that's just catching up to what should have been released with W10. Transparency effects need to implemented in those parts for consistency UX/UI design.

The issue with poor perception is that even the most trivial feedback, e.g. when I reported blaring font spacing bug, it takes several months for a fix to make it even into Insider builds. There are bugs that should take 2 minutes to fix and should appear in the next release, yet they take a year ...or sometimes aren't fixed at all, despite their triviality.

@pavandavuluri Regarding quality: Reintroducing ClearType back to the overal GUI would help a lot in improving the perception. If your engineers need ideas on how to do it for composited surfaces, I wrote a short paper on that: github.com/tringi/papers/…

The team and I have spent the past several months analyzing feedback from the community. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better. Read this blog post to learn more about what we're doing in response as we look to raise the bar on Windows 11 quality. Please keep the feedback coming, to help us shape the future of Windows together. blogs.windows.com/windows-inside…

@zacbowden I'll believe it when I see it.

BREAKING: Microsoft just announced several major changes to Windows 11 in an effort to win back user trust and evolve the platform into something people will actually want to use over macOS and Linux! It's a huge announcement that addresses Windows 11's biggest problems today, tackling core fundamental issues such as unreliable system performance, UX consistency, AI bloat and general enshittification. Microsoft has confirmed that this year, it WILL be reducing where ads and Copilot appear throughout the system, including in Start, Widgets, Notepad, Photos, and more! File Explorer and Windows Search will be upgraded with improved performance and capabilities that make finding apps and files much faster and easier. The OS will become lighter with less RAM and system utilization at idle, making it smoother to run on low end hardware with limited memory. These improvements will also benefit high-end PCs too. Windows Update will be improved with more granular controls and the ability to postpone updates for longer, along with reducing how often the OS needs to restart to install an update. Microsoft has also confirmed that it's bringing back fan favourite features such as the ability to move the Taskbar! It's also working to update more areas of the system shell with modern WinUI designs, which should make Windows 11 feel more coherent and complete. There's much more in the announcement, and it honestly all sounds too good to be true. Microsoft really is listening to feedback, and is eager to make Windows the BEST desktop OS on the market. More details including when these changes will arrive in the link! windowscentral.com/microsoft/wind…

@never_released Definitely. IIRC it's the only Windows ABI that spills pair parameters (std::span or std::string_view) into registers for example.

While ARM64EC is a really nice ABI to have, please use the native ARM64 ABI if you can when targeting ARM64 Windows

C:\> compact /C /S:C:\ /I /F /EXE:LZX

@TukiFromKL Did LLMs just digest all the millions of "rm -rf /*" and "del System32" jokes as a valid solution and simply applies them when inference chain ends up there?

🚨 Do you understand what's happening at Amazon right now? Their own AI coding agent Kiro reportedly "decided" the fastest way to fix a config error was to delete the entire production environment. Gone. A 6-hour outage. 6.3 million orders lost. Amazon's SVP called thousands of engineers into a mandatory meeting this week. Not to discuss strategy. To discuss damage control. Now here's my prediction and I want you to screenshot this: Amazon won't just ban AI-assisted code. They'll make every engineer personally liable for AI-generated code they approve. Other Big Tech will follow within 6 months. Think about what that means. The same companies that fired thousands of engineers to "restructure around AI" are about to tell the remaining ones.. you're now legally responsible for code you didn't write, can't fully understand, and were told to ship faster. Atlassian fired 1,600 people this morning to go all-in on AI. Replit is hiring kids who vibe code. And Amazon, the company that BUILT one of these AI coding agents just watched it nuke production. The vibe coding era isn't ending. But the "move fast and let AI break things" era is about to hit a wall. And that wall is called liability. Companies wanted AI to replace engineers. Now they need engineers to babysit AI. And they already fired the babysitters.

@ivanrouzanov @stevesi Unironically true!

This, @stevesi, is what a really good UI looks like! ;)

@SheriefFYI @vic_hates_x @k1rab0shi There are some demos on Steam, e.g. Pragmata, that list Windows 11 as a requirement, but installed, started and run on my LTSC 2021 perfectly well.

@vic_hates_x @k1rab0shi what games today are win11 only?

I think it's wild that you expect to drop support for an operating system with 40% Steam user share.

@k1rab0shi if you were in charge of releasing a AAA game or an indie game today would you make it Windows 11 only?

I have 3 games drafted. Indie, of course. Projects created and build infrastructure set up. Everything's just waiting for a spare time to magically appear. With two of the games I want to support even Windows 7. One might not end up that way though, due to performance necessities. The third could be Windows 7 too, but it wouldn't have any playerbase on Windows 7. Neither would be Windows 11 only. Then again, I maintain a couple of HMI/embedded applications that are still being deployed on new POSReady09 machines today, so I might be biased.

Also, why it's just doubling? Why not 64 registers or 128 even? Then most functions would fit their entire working set into registers, completely rid of movs for stack/register swapping, relieving I$ pressure, register renaming, and even allow for some way better __fastcall2.

I'm kind of wary of the real world benefits of APX. All those very common instructions getting additional byte(s) of prefix will greatly increase L1 instruction cache pressure.

@NearestCommit Ah, 2006, when we had animated video wallpapers and glass frames. And now, 20 years later, on an order of magnitude faster PC, right-click Desktop menu takes several seconds to appear.

what the fuck is this

For a few tests I provisioned 64 cores of Epyc 9V45 on Azure and holy shit, what a crazy beast! At first I thought I deployed buggy build, as how fast it was finished. Yet, Windows (Server 2025) GUI is still lagging. Right-click menu on the Desktop takes over a second to appear.

Yeah. I recently couldn't recall FSCTL_GET_RETRIEVAL_POINTERS, so I asked an "AI." It hallucinated out complete MSDN page about FSCTL_GET_NTFS_FILE_EXTENTS. Which of course doesn't exist. It took IOCTL_VOLUME_GET_VOLUME_DISK_EXTENTS and rewrote it in terms of a file; invented new pretty structures and all.

@vxunderground When I try to use it for windows stuff it hallucinates entire APIs. Made up names, arguments, everything. Like you said, it does better when I write high level code or pretty common things like generating a template for a driver or an rpc interface

I've had so many people tell me to check out Claude. I tried it with my malware stuff (C WINAPI) and this thing produced some S-tier slop. It produced incredibly dangerous, over complicated, or straight up incorrect work. It did do a good job with API searching and stuff. Claude showed me some things I didn't know about. However, the implementation was wrong. I literally sent it a direct link to MSDN and it said, "You're absolutely right! My definition was wrong!". Or I would ask it something about the Windows registry and it would just straight up hallucinate something about WoW64 redirection. I suspect part of the problem is the lack of lower level C WINAPI documentation ... maybe? I don't know. High level stuff like Python it seems to do pretty good. I've had so many people try to gas me up about Claude and AI. Dude, it's cool, I get it, okay? But it is still dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. My best advice is to use AI to learn. Ask it questions. Study. Do NOT copy paste code from it.

@phantomofearth And no SDK for anything.

Imagine upgrading to 29531 and going "the next few weeks will be cool I bet" Br(uh) path: 2 29xxx path: 0